Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It by M. Nolan Gray

     In Arbitrary Lines, M. Nolan Gray makes the case against zoning. His thesis is that zoning is not just a good institution gone bad. Rather, he says that its purpose is to exclude, to increase property values/prices, to slow the pace of new development, and to segregate cities by race and class through the elevation of the detached single-family house as the peak of human development. I think that while he is certainly right about those all being effects of zoning as well as motivations for its creation, I don't think he gives enough credence to zoning as a means of creating predictability for builders and as a mechanism for avoiding inefficient lawsuits. I can't help but think that both he and I have experiences that make us think that the systems we have seen up close are inefficient. Gray was a planner, and wants the local bureaucracy out of land use, but as a law student, I can say that the legal system is also highly inefficient and so I don't really want it with us.

    The case of Houston continues to confuse me. Gray points out that Houston doesn't have zoning and gets along fine using deed restrictions in about a quarter of the city and then other restrictions on things like noise pollution. Houston forms some natural patters typical of cities, such as high development at the center and industrial uses around major arteries. But I wish Gray would have gotten into car use in Houston. He mentions it offhand and I know its not central to his book, but it just feels weird to discuss Houston without addressing why it is one of the most car-mandatory cities in the country. If a city that isn't zoned ends up like that, we need an explanation why. I don't feel like Houston is that great of a city, but I've never been. But if New York is achieving better urban development with zoning, then I don't think zoning is the problem.

Miscellaneous Fact:

• By misallocating huge amounts of the US labor market through zoning, economists Chant-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti have found that zoning causes an annual loss of $1.6 trillion in wages. They also found that zoning reduced growth by 36 percent between 1964 and 2009..

Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century by Helen Thompson

    In Disorder, Helen Thompson writes a book very similar to Adam Tooze's Crashed, in that both are basically reviews of geopolitics, economics, and democracies. However, Thompson's book goes a little further since it was written later. I'm honestly not totally sure what this book is about. It kind of jumps from thing to thing and feels chaotic since it's not in chronological order. I didn't really get it. I suppose it is a "first draft of history," but otherwise I couldn't get many major themes from it.

    A big part of the book is about oil and gas, specifically how greater US shale oil production has put us into conflict with Russia to sell oil and natural gas to Europe. In 2010, the USA produced 8.6 million barrels of crude oil and natural gas, but we hit 13 million by 2014 and 18.4 million by 2019. Imports from OPEC fell by a third between 2014 and 2019 while US exports grew by three quarters between 2010 and 2014, outpacing Saudi Arabia by 2019. European dependence on Russian oil has been a major weakness, and oil and gas were exempted from sanctions on Russia in 2014 when it invaded Ukraine. With a free hand, Russia launched operations in Syria and then invaded Ukraine again this year.

    Something extremely enlightening in this book is that Nord Stream 1 was originally built to shut Ukraine out of Russian gas exports. In 2005, 75% of Russian gas exports to the EU went through Ukraine, something that changed drastically when Nord Stream 1 began operating in 2012. So much of this makes the Merkel government's legacy look absolutely terrible by committing to shutting down nuclear and agreeing to support a second Nord Stream pipeline.

    In the third part of the book, Thompson engages in some interesting discussion of nationalism. She makes the interesting point that only in the Islamic world has there been a really strong attack on nationalism, and that even in Communist countries, nationalism remains useful to governments and is not weakened by the supposed "international" movement. There is also some interesting discussion of the fact that representative democracies need a way to procure the losers' consent, and that liberal democracies are increasingly failing to do that. She writes that nationhood was the means by which losers could consent, since they acknowledged the shared nationality of their countrymen. But as nationalism either declines or becomes based in a racial or ethnic identity not shared by all citizens of the state, losers are not so willing to consent to defeat anymore. Ethnic, identitarian coalitions are bringing the West into dangerous territory. I wish Thompson dealt more with these ideas in the book.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• I love well-written statements about economics like this one about the Bretton Woods system: "As a dollar order, Bretton Woods had made the American currency the only currency convertible into gold and the currency for much international trade."
• The Bank of the United States that Andrew Jackson shut down was actually the Second Bank of the United States, since the charter of the first one was allowed to expire in 1811. I suppose the third time is the charm with the Federal Reserve.

Part 3: Democratic Politics